Let’s Not Mirror Trump

Tags

In early 2006, the City Club of Cleveland invited President George W. Bush to speak.

At the time, this invitation was a controversial one, as the Iraq War was becoming increasingly unpopular and plenty of Americans blamed Bush for having relied on false intelligence to wage it. Some liberals here in Cleveland grumbled: Why give Bush another chance to promote lies about this war?

The City Club, with its storied history as a citadel of free speech, was undeterred. It had welcomed plenty of controversial figures in the past, and it would welcome this one. Bush addressed a packed house on March 20 — the third anniversary of the day the war began.

One of the traditions of the City Club is audience participation. Only one speaker in the forum’s history didn’t take questions: U.S. Sen. Robert F. Kennedy, who spoke the day after Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated.

On the day that George W. Bush spoke, a City Club legend rose to his feet to ask a question that made national news.

Stanley Adelstein was an 87-year-old attorney who had joined the City Club in 1941. Like his wife, Hope, Stanley was a philanthropist and a community activist. He was a former city councilman, a veteran and a champion of the First Amendment. He was also a beloved friend to countless people, including my husband and me.

Stanley had a habit of looking harmless, with his slight, bent build and eyes squinting through oversized glasses, but he was more than ready for George Bush. In his soft, gentle voice, Stanley calmly laid out the three reasons Bush had given the country as justification for the war:

“Weapons of mass destruction, the claim that Iraq was sponsoring terrorists who had attacked us on 9/11, and that Iraq had purchased nuclear materials from the Niger.”

“All three of those,” Stanley continued, “turned out to be false.”

The audience hummed.

Stanley wasn’t done. “My question is: How do we restore confidence that Americans may have in their leaders and to be sure that the information they are giving is now correct?”

Bush’s response included this admission: “Like you, I asked that very same question: Where did we go wrong on intelligence?”

Stanley was a local hero after that.

Two years before he died, in 2015, Stanley told me over dinner that he had no idea he would “stir up things” with his question. “It’s the City Club,” he said, flashing his shy grin. “It’s what we do here. It’s what keeps us strong.”

This week the City Club has stirred up things again by inviting Corey Lewandowski, a former campaign manager for Donald Trump. He is not a president, but he influences our current one. He is also, in my view, a full-time troll.

Lewandowski has trafficked in racism, promoting the lie that Barack Obama was not born in the U.S. He defended an anti-Semitic meme tweeted by candidate Trump and later deleted. He grabbed a female reporter and yanked her so hard she had a bruise on her arm. Lately he has been regularly spewing his lies Fox so-called News.

Reaction to the City Club invitation has been decidedly mixed, with mostly liberals opposing it. Many of these people are my friends. I understand why they argue that the last thing Lewandowski needs is a respected forum that could give him legitimacy and increase his influence. I understand, but I disagree.

How little we seem to trust our fellow Americans these days, to the point where we think we have to control what they hear. If the argument is that we must now limit our tolerance for speech, count me out. I hate that the City Club invited Lewandowski — and I support its decision to do so.

To shut down Lewandowski here in Cleveland would be to mirror what Donald Trump is trying to do to this country. He demonizes those who dare to question him, calling journalists the “enemy of the people.” Slowly, but ever so steadily, he is shutting down traditional White House avenues of communication, which means he is shutting out the American people. People like you, to be specific.

Which litmus test applies, and whose? The guarantees of free speech are not meant to bend and sway to our whims, but rather to stand strong in spite of them. Denying Lewandowski a City Club forum is not suppressing his First Amendment rights. It would, however, diminish us.

We are sturdier than any ridiculousness that comes out of Lewandowski’s mouth.

His words reveal him, and in Cleveland he cannot hide. Let him speak, and let the audience have its say.

“It’s what we do here,” Stanley Adelstein said. “It’s what keeps us strong.”

Connie Schultz is a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist and professional in residence at Kent State University’s school of journalism. She is the author of two books, including “…and His Lovely Wife,” which chronicled the successful race of her husband, Sherrod Brown, for the U.S. Senate. To find out more about Connie Schultz (con.schultz@yahoo.com) and read her past columns, please visit the Creators Syndicate webpage at www.creators.com.

36 responses to “Let’s Not Mirror Trump”

Back in the Dark Ages when I was in college (some guy named Milhouse and another named after a car were the Presidents) we had many speakers with many opposition viewpoints. When Mier Kahane spoke, instead of protesting his appearance, the Muslim students attended and asked him pointed questions about his stance on Israel, expansion and Islam. When a member of the PLO spoke, the Jewish students did not protest his appearance. Instead, they came and politely asked him questions about the survival of Israel, peace and the Palestinian questions. That was 40+ years ago. We were more tolerant then of others opinions. Now, if you don’t like what someone says, you channel surf until you find someone who parrots what you believe. So, if I am of an open mind, why do I keep returning to National Memo? Because there is the possibility of polite, intelligent discourse here. While we have some on both sides who tend to incite and rattle the other side, many of us wish to hear legitimate discussion and politely debate it with others. Something not possible on The Federalist, Fox News, or even many other Liberal sites, where anyone who disagrees with an article is branded a traitor and blocked. Here’s to open discourse, polite discussion, and yes, even the occasional flame war.

The traditional answer to your first question: Legitimate disagreement ends and hate speech begins when one side is crying “Fire!” in a crowded theater–and there isn’t one.

Of course, your second question points to a potential weakness of the “crying ‘Fire!’ in a crowded theater” limitation on free speech: It is not always possible to determine who is to be the judge of whether or not something is a “fire” that endangers everyone in the crowded theater. I will offer an example:

For five years, beginning when my son was 3 and a half years old, we lived in France. Often, I took him on the bus to the zoo in Paris, where the lions and tigers roamed a savannah separated from visitors to the zoo by only a deep, empty moat and a two-foot fence, presumably to keep visitors from falling into the moat. My son had a backpack that looked like a little monkey clinging to his shoulders, and I decided I did not feel comfortable letting him wear it near that exhibit. Privately, I thought that parents in France must be far more casual about exposing their children to potential danger than American parents like myself (who would go on to earn the title “helicopter parent”). But one day, a lion broke free of the “enclosure,” and the whole Metro system on that side of Paris was immediately shut down. Parisians who had been content with the exhibit panicked and were truly afraid, until the lion was back in its imitation savannah behind the deep, empty moat.

I suppose that in the courts, one definition of free speech prevails; and in the court of public opinion, another–at least until someone lets the dogs out.

And in the late 20s and early 30s there were people in Germany who said Hitler would help their economy and restore German pride, who otherwise would not have supported someone like him. The late and unlamented (except by some sick individuals) Chancellor of Germany made sure his audience heard what they wanted to hear. What he never told them was how he would accomplish what he promised. 45 did much the same from June 2015 until his election. Lots of promises, but no plans. The question is will we roll over and bare our throats as did the German people in 1933?

Good point. We might have to listen to Trump and his B.S., but we don’t have to roll over and play dead: witness the very effective planned and spontaneous demonstrations that have stalled the Repeal and Replace Movement in its tracks.

It ‘s truly a tragic day for America when people elect someone into the Oval Office who is so out of touch with reality (also known as outright ignorant) that in an interview he would make comments such as the following:

“I know a lot about health care,” President Donald Trump declared in a Wednesday interview with the New York Times.

“From the moment the insurance, you’re 21 years old, you start working and you’re paying $12 a year for insurance, and by the time you’re 70, you get a nice plan,” Trump told the Times.

In an earlier interview on health insurance he had said the following in an interview with the Economist:

“Insurance is, you’re 20 years old, you just graduated from college, and you start paying $15 a month for the rest of your life and you really need it, you’re still paying the same amount and that’s really insurance,” Trump told the magazine.

I find it incomprehensible that not only is Trump totally ignorant in so many sectors of running our government, but it’s clear that the people he has supporting him are as equally ignorant because they’re not even picking up on asinine things he says. (And that clearly includes Pence.)

If we don’t get this ignoramus out of the White House, and hopefully all his ignorant cohorts, America is going to be set back even intellectually by 100 plus years.

And sadly, there are millions of people who listen to these totally out of touch imbeciles working in the White House (not just Trump) and come away saying – I like what these guys are saying. What does that say for the mentality of a large segment of the U.S. population? No wonder the World is laughing at us!!!

Do I get to point out Fox, Sinclair, and the rest of the RWMO? When does news leave off and propaganda begin? What happens when ostensible news services fail?

A story. As the Great Recession worsened, President Bush dumped his RW rhetoric and adopted the policies we Democrats had been urging. Fox “News” and Business cheered and pointed out the successes of these policies. Beginning on 1/20/09 though Fox started to criticize those selfsame policies and pointed out their failures and shortcomings. The policies hadn’t changed, but they went from good to bad almost overnight.

OF COURSE you may point to the outright lies that constitute most of the programming coming out of the RWMO, which has kept so many fact-checkers “in cigarettes,” as we used to say in the bad old days. Add to that the Russian disinformation machine gearing up even today for the 2018 elections. Nowadays, these are the things “that try men’s souls,” to paraphrase an unreconstructed patriot of the eighteenth century.

Our forefathers (and mothers!) pined for fast and accurate transport of information, and now we are practically suffocated by it, because there is no reliable filter–except the same stubborn, unvarnished, unavoidable boulder called, in their day and ours, the truth. If you spend everyday pushing it uphill, you are right. If it hits you on the head on its way down, you are wrong.

Indeed, we could use a dose of “Common Sense”. These are not the times for the sunshine patriot.

But how to get the truth out among the totality of noise?

My fear is that we are proving unworthy of our Parents and Grandparents. That we don’t deserve the liberty that their blood bought us. That our selfishness and indolence have cost us more dearly than we know.

There you go again, preaching to the choir–though not in a way anyone in their right mind would call “preachy.” I’m afraid that the truth will emerge as surely as night follows day, turning Trump’s Mar-a-lago into an island before some of his comrades-in-arms accept the reality of climate change.

I don’t know if we can blame selfishness and indolence entirely for this debacle, especially when those willing to put their shoulder to the wheel are kept from it by the indulged few: In our Midwestern town, highly qualified teachers with twenty years of experience offering to work in retirement for pennies by participating in AmeriCorps are turned away so that recent high school grads (sons and daughters of local elites) who didn’t get into college can have something worthwhile to do for a year before trying again to be admitted to a college. Nepotism and cronyism triumph once again, even though the goal of the AmeriCorps program in our locality is, ostensibly, to bring elementary students not reading at grade level up to snuff.

I take consolation in the fact that when Richard Hofstadter wrote “Anti-intellectualism in American Life” (1964) he could not have anticipated our generation, whose enthusiasm for education made a college degree a requirement for many occupations and made both science and computer literacy the norm. Maybe this current strain of anti-intellectualism with Trump as its avatar is only a temporary correction before the pendulum swings back the other way. Call me hopeful but very impatient.

I need to congratulate you on the effort and research you put into you posts. I’d completely forgotten about Hofstadter. I need to find him in the library and re-read him.

Having said that I am somewhat abashed to admit that I can’t recall who refers to the “stupidification” of America. In essence that the RWMO is reducing discussion to a series of slogans, buzz words, and fuzz words. But that’s been with us since the 1960s.

Being preachy is one of my many failings. Don’t humiliate me too greatly when pointing out that I’m over the line.

You are more optimistic than I about the eventual recovery from Trumpism. Whether Trump is a cause or an effect, an issue upon which Aaron and I disagree, I fear the djinn released will not easily return to the bottle.

I wish I could do more research/reading original materials. I am really just a mental pack-rat with a mind that hoards the weirdest things, forgets where they came from, and then returns to the well via the Internet: At that point, there is an explosion or something, and it all comes back to me.

I don’t know how long we are in for, battling this scourge of Trumpism, stupidification, anti-intellectualism . . . whatever you want to call it. On my to-read list is xxxx’s trilogy on the history of slavery, which requires three volumes, unfortunately: xxxx. I hope it doesn’t take that long to send this fat slob back into the bottle along with “the horse he came in on.”

As for weapons, about all I can count on are my fingers and my words: in that arena of combat, I am the queen of preachy. You have a long way to go to depose me. At my best, I am the god-daughter of a Lutheran preacher who used to go from parish to parish on horseback in the Montana back country. At my worst, I write poetry. This one I wrote for a friend with bipolar affective disorder (maybe that’s what’s wrong with our country):

A Risk

Here is a gift: to open a book when the hired hand must plow, to open the hand when the body clenches as if beneath a blow meant to warn nothing good is left you.

Do not listen to it.

Hold on until harvest is done for good. Read valiantly against the haunted storm.

“Take a Sister, then, by the hand. Lead her away from this foreign land. Far away where we might laugh again.

Am I really a foreigner in my home?

I forget the Author, but he wrote that in the 1850s, the USA was held together by its shared organizations. But these started fracturing, the churches, newspapers, the Whig Party. Finally only the Democratic Party was left, and when it fractured late in the decade, there was nothing left to hold the country together.

Better sample the Davis book you were able to check out. If it suits, you can recall the rest or get them through interlibrary loan. I’m afraid we’ve meandered away from discussing incivility in the twenty-first century to the cause–it is the cause, perhaps–of our current troubles, issues that were not resolved by the Civil War. I think we’ve done enough for one day. See you on tomorrow’s comment thread.

Again, if you don’t want to hear the speaker or don’t believe in what he has to say, don’t buy a ticket. You can protest peacefully by picketing the speech, but violence is NOT the answer and colleges canceling these speakers is also not the answer.

The rise of extremism isn’t confined to certain Muslim countries where rigidity of thought and paranoia about imagined enemies of Islam have led to fanaticism. A similar phenomenon has been evolving over the past century in America, partly due to misinterpretation and misapplication of Christianity in the West, along with an exponential rise in materialism and an insane nationalism. Trump has the greed down pat, and his nationalism is just him parroting what insane purveyors of ultra-nationalism put forth, like Steve Bannon.

Trump’s dysfunction is driven not per se by any ideology—political or religious— but is motivated by narcissism, an unrefined character without the benefit of any spiritual virtues, and greed.

In world history for every greed leader, there has been a massive downfall and gruesome death. Remember what Elizabeth I did in the 1600s to her enemies? Most were beheaded and their heads impaled on poles that were displayed publicly as a warning.

Mussolini didn’t fare much better: Hanged upside next to his lover, Carla Petacci in the public square.

Hitler supposedly offed himself after taking his lover, Braun, with him.

All it proves it that men who lust for such autonomous power forget the most significant factor of their existence: They are part of a society. They just never learned to adapt themselves to the society into which they were born.

Your excellent post, EW, touches on an irony that we all feel acutely in this country. The elitist writers of our constitution designed the Electoral College to serve as a check on the popular election of an unsuitable candidate for president. That’s why the Electoral College was filled with appointed electors who were assumed to be a cut above the great unwashed of the general electorate. The framers of our constitution must be rolling over in their graves at the election and presidency of Donald Trump!

Thank you. When you live in the NY/NJ Metro region, Trump’s mug is at least 4 decades embedded into our media. I recall in an interview with People Magazine, on the precipice of his Daddy handing him money to get into real estate, he stated, “I fight dirty. I don’t worry about consequences. Money always makes consequences disappear.”

When he told his 3 children this, his then wife Ivana was appalled. That was before they divoced and she didn’t have a gag order attached to her $2 million a month alimony settlement monitored by an undertaker lawyer like Kasowitz. Such is the fear Trump has for his 2 ex wives spilling their guts to the press.

I blame the Republican Party as much as I now blame Trump for the abuse to the use of the Electoral College to win elections. That is how the last 2 Republican presidents rigged the election.

As you stated, the Electoral College was established by the framers of the Constitution for the sole purpose of ensuring that states with the smallest populations had equal voice in elections vs. states with the largest populations.

But now, the Republican Party has abused that total basis and instead increases their Electors in their states by gerrymandering and redistricting maps.

Texas and NC all ended up in front of the SC for those abuses. In 2008, TX had only 28 electors. Every year since 2008, they used redistricted voting maps to increase that number to 38. Not because TX had a sudden spurt in population growth. Because TX, like NC, overlapped Dem voting districts into GOP districts to make it appear there was an increase in voters in GOP districts. This kind of slimey BS has to stop.

Although, in reality, the GOP knows all they need do now is tap Putin’s shoulder and he’ll change voting registries as he did in CA where 21 voters were “deleted” from registries. When they went to the polls to vote, they were told they weren’t registered.

I’m with you (with only a hunch to back me up, however) that Russian meddling went very deep indeed into our electoral process. If Trump were not such an ignoramus, he would know that such meddling is highly likely. Like Putin, he counts on the ignorance and complacence of the voting public, especially those who will suffer the loss of food, drink, and decent health care to follow the dictates of their beloved “blessed leader.” It is like the infatuation of an abused wife with her abusing husband. But this is probably a growing minority within this country and probably also Russia, thanks to the Internet and the gradual turn-over of population demographics. My hope is that will eventually upend Trump’s applecart (and Putin’s thereafter) is the earthquake coming eventually, set off by the rage of those who do not adore these celebrity presidents so much as to let them undermine the well-being of themselves and their families. Trump and his Republican enablers have not counted on the determination that can overcome all of their cheating and thinly veiled excuses, though Trump should have guessed at this when he saw video on the news of disabled voters tossing themselves out of their wheelchairs in the halls of Congress in protest to his Repeal and Replace initiative. Even the patience of voters intent on waiting for the wheels of the constitution to grind Trump and his cronies out of office can be tried too far.

Trump’s big mouth disclosed something in his tweet yesterday he unwittingly didn’t plan to. When he commented on Kushner’s announcement to the public, he for the umpteenth time continue to doubt any Russian hacking took place.

He claimed in his tweet the “Russians are too smart to get caught.” In that tweet, Trump disclosed the very core of his excuse for life on planet earth: To never get caught. This is why he so adores Putin. Putin thus far has committed murder and assassinations of over 41 journalits and dissenters and got away with it.

Putin rigged his own election and then changed Russian government rules allowing him to run for president for life if he so chooses. Now, Trump is trying to do the same by pardoning himself. If he commits murder, he figures, like Putin, he won’t get caught. If he gets caught, he’ll pardon himself.

How close is this to dictatorship?

The only reality for Trump now is one he never expected: When he took on Sessions and bashed hell out of him, threatenging to fire him, he forgot that Sessions was a US Senator from the Confederate states. Those good ole boys stick together like gum on your shoe on the hottest day of the year. Trump’s ass is now grass and the Confederacy is his lawn mower.

They’ll sabotage him to get even for his taking Sessions down. Even if Trump turns on the charm and tries to say it was all just to stop the Russian hacking investigation he knows he is more than guilty of, these rebels will not forgive or forget the shame and embarassment he put Sessions through. If there is one thing I do admire about the Confederates, it is their sense of pride in their oft times ill conceived “honor.” Not much different though than my father’s Italian side of the family. lol

And it’s not just the Confederates in Congress who will have Sessions’s back: It is also Confederate voters wearing MAGA caps, who responded to the dog-whistle of Sessions’s appeal as a Trump surrogate almost from the time Trump won the nomination of the Republican Party. It was Sessions who brought these White southerners into Trump’s big tent, with their thinly disguised racist code words and antiquated racist agenda. Sessions has been implementing that via a return to maximum sentences (in defiance of Obama and Holden’s efforts to reduce this practice), the new initiative to seize property in arrests, and other types of police procedures set to take us back to what the rest of us would call “the bad old days.” As far as the same honor code governing European ethnic groups, I can say with a little more authority than I could a few years ago that in the Middle Ages, the Catholic Church carried out its battle on two fronts: to defy the honor code the governed the aristocracy throughout Europe (with myriad variations) and to defy pagan influences that governed peasants and commoners of all stripes. In a medieval system governed by extreme oaths made on the dagger or the sword, when loyalty failed revenge came into play. At first the aristocracy used Indulgences to try to buy their way out of culpability with the church, which was happy to accrue wealth from guilty parties in the upper classes. These same classes also began to fill the ranks of the clergy, as only eldest sons could inherit, leaving the younger ones to take up the cloth. The ultimate merger of the aristocracy and the church was carried out in the Crusades, which served the purpose of killing off a great number of members of the aristocracy with nothing to do but play at honor politics. The Black Plague came along in 1350 and further decimated the population of Europe as well as the clergy, who died in significant numbers because priests and nuns provided medical care for all but the poorest members of society, who still depended on folk remedies. Even this culling of the population did not get rid of the honor code or its adherents, whose apogee was the reign of Louis the XIV. I might also add that the religious wars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries simply resulted in the excesses of the honor code being absorbed by both Catholics and Prostestants–a circumstance that has persisted to this very day. This is the tradition to which Sessions’s loyalists will adhere when they turn on Trump for bullying one of their own.

I so agree. I hadn’t considered that Trump making a mockery of Sessions would also mean loss of votes.

As a northeastern Yankee, we had that “Pride goeth before a fall and a haughty spirit before destruction,” drummed into our heads. So while I do admire the culture in the south for their pride, I am also wary of pridefulness that easily overlaps into ego of the kind Trump possesses.

Sigrid: As I’ve pointed out before, most of his voters (and some of his non-voters) seem to think that Obamacare and the ACA are two different programs. They think that if Obamacare is appealed, they will STILL be covered by the ACA! Unfortunately, FAUX News and the other RW news organizations keep that lie going. They will be totally taken aback when they find out that they were lied to, especially by Trump when he said during his campaign that they would have BETTER insurance, MORE benefits, and pay LESS money! In fact, what he’s pushing is the exact opposite. But, as I said, they seem to think that they will STILL be covered by the ACA if Obamacare is repealed! It’s truly sad because they actually BELIEVE this BS and nothing you tell them will change their minds.

Agreed, about the crowd in MAGA caps who desire nothing more than to hang on every word of their “beloved leader” and shout his praises. They will have to visit the doctor with a sick child and be turned away (or charged $135 for an appointment plus full cost of medications) before they question what they believe about their celebrity crush. That’s what I mean about Americans drawing a red line when it comes to harming their family. I can’t help but think that Republicans in the Senate, some of whom are not a stupid as Trump and his tribe, divined this possibility when they refused to vote for the “skinny” repeal and replace (or counted on three of their number to scuttle it). Republicans in Congress will be on the front line of rebuke when Trump’s most devoted followers suddenly realize that he endangered their families.

Aaron, you forgot to add outright ignorance. The number of areas within our government that Trump is totally ignorant about (and virtually everyone who works for him in the White House) is appalling.

How can someone who has run so many companies as Trump say something like the following without him being a total ignoramus:

Trump himself, meanwhile, has spent years as a top executive at a business that provides health insurance to its employees.So you would think that even if he were completely ignorant of every single topic of public policy, he would at least be aware that to provide a person with health insurance is expensive. It is, after all, an expense that his businesses incur:

TRUMP: But what it does, Maggie, it means it gets tougher and tougher. As they get something, it gets tougher. Because politically, you can’t give it away. So pre-existing conditions are a tough deal. Because you are basically saying from the moment the insurance, you’re 21 years old, you start working and you’re paying $12 a year for insurance, and by the time you’re 70, you get a nice plan. Here’s something where you walk up and say, “I want my insurance.” It’s a very tough deal, but it is something that we’re doing a good job of.

There are so many target-rich pointers to factors that figure into the depraved nature of Trump that it’s easy to miss a few. We all have faults, as I clearly do, but Trump’s stand out because they have resulted in so many random premeditated murders and other violent expressions in the country so far.

By personal observation of the 4 CEOs I worked closely with 8 hours a day, five days a week, I can tell you that CEO are never influenced by anyone. What they really do is gather influence they feel is to their advantage. So, they pick a little bit of influence data from a master finance genius, a little from a few leaders of whom they are most envious and then, they create their master plans for greatness. If that sounds simplistic, it really is as simple as that.

I’ve seen CEOs steal ideas from their “associates” without the associates realizing they’d been used. These kinds of CEOs are guys who have no scruples, ethics or principles. Even murder is perfectly acceptable if the ends justify the means. There is no extreme to them. Mostly because they believe they set the degree of extreme.

Trump’s big problem is trying to normalize his power agenda which mirrors precisely Putin’s in every way. It isn’t a coincidence that Trump spoke to Putin in a G20 dinner social for an hour that was supposed to be for leaders and spouses, while his wife Melania, so coincidentally sat next to Putin. James Bond would have a field day with that scenario.

All I see is that the more Trump digs his hole with his brazen, ruthless tweets attempting to be as powerful as Putin and to reshape the US government in the same Putinesque style, the more he appears to be what he is: a tyrannical old fool.

I am often amazed at just how many variables there were among those 4 CEOs I worked for. I can say only 2 of the 4 were men whom I actually respected. Those 2 were always fair and honest. Maybe they were an aberration. The other 2 were only out for themselves all the time. Every single decision they made was based on them as the central focus. It was almost as if they couldn’t see a world in which they were not the most important.

The White House indicated Sunday that President Trump would accept new legislation imposing sanctions on Russia and curtailing his authority to lift them on his own. why would this even be an issue at all ???? how can the DUMPSTER CULT KLAN even be wasting time and money to be thinking that thy might want to help the Russian B/F of the DUMPSTER CLOWN ?

The First Amendment gives us the right to speak freely, whether or not others like what we say. But, I feel, the real tie in with free speech is also doing what you say. Acting responsibly, respecting other’s rights and yes, feelings. Being hurtful just because you can is not the same as telling someone something they need to realize, even if it is somewhat hurtful (in the short term). I paid attention to Trump’s actions for 40 years because they caught my attention. It is not that I obsessed with following him or had to find every little detail. It was because I would read about what he said, then see what he had done. So when someone says “Actions speak louder than words.”, believe them. They do. And his actions through the years belie any good he claims to do. Why, because the only good he does is for himself. If he can get away with it. So allowing someone like Lewandowski to speak will expose him as what he really is. That is if you care to really listen and think and not get swayed by hollow promises.

I have to agree with the author…..if a controversial person comes to a college to speak and the students don’t like what he may say…..they don’t have to attend and can even picket the event peacefully. They don’t have to incur violence or allow the college to deny this person to speak….but, they can show their displeasure by just not attending. And, when the speaker sees that he has a very small group, he’ll realize that he’s just not that popular!